- Rutler, George William.
Coincidentally.
New York: Crossroad Publishing, 2006.
ISBN 978-0-8245-2440-1.
-
This curious little book is a collection of the author's
essays on historical coincidences originally published
in
Crisis Magazine.
Each explores coincidences around a general theme.
“Coincidence” is defined rather loosely and generously.
Consider (p. 160),
“Two years later in Missouri, the St. Louis Municipal Bridge was
dedicated concurrently with the appointment of England's poet laureate,
Robert Bridges. The numerical sum of the year of his birth, 1844,
multiplied by 10, is identical to the length in feet of the
Philadelphia-Camden Bridge over the Delaware
River.”
Here is paragraph from p. 138 which illustrates what's
in store for you in these essays.
Odd and tragic coincidences in maritime history render a
little more plausible the breathless meters of James Elroy
Flecker (1884–1915): “The dragon-green, the luminous, the
dark, the serpent-haunted sea.” That sea haunts me too,
especially with the realization that Flecker died in the year of the
loss of 1,154 lives on the Lusitania. More odd than tragic is this:
the United States Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan (in H. L. Mencken's
estimation “The National Tear-Duct”) officially
protested the ship's sinking on May 13, 1915 which was
the 400th anniversary, to the day, of the marriage of the Duke
of Suffolk to Mary, the widow of Louis XII and sister of Henry
VIII, after she had spurned the hand of the Archduke Charles.
There is something ominous even in the name of the great hydrologist
of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who set
the standards for water purification: Thomas Drown
(1842–1904). Swinburne capitalized on the pathos: “… the
place of the slaying of Itylus / The feast of Daulis, the Thracian
sea.” And a singularly melancholy fact about the sea is that
Swinburne did not end up in it.
I noted several factual errors. For example, on p. 169, Chuck Yeager is
said to have flown a “B-51 Mustang” in World War II (the correct
designation is
P-51). Such lapses
make you wonder about the reliability of other details, which are far
more arcane and difficult to verify.
The author is opinionated and not at all hesitant to share his acerbic
perspective: on p. 94 he calls Richard Wagner a
“master of Nazi elevator music”. The vocabulary will send
almost all readers other than William F. Buckley (who contributed a
cover blurb to the book) to the dictionary from time to time. This is
not a book you'll want to read straight through—your head will
end up spinning with all the details and everything will dissolve into
a blur. I found a chapter or two a day about right. I'd sum it up
with Abraham Lincoln's observation “Well, for those who like
that sort of thing, I should think it is just about the sort of thing
they would like.”
February 2008 